‘A warp jump?’ repeated Sicarius, horrified. ‘While we’re still in the atmosphere? It’ll tear this moon apart – and we could end up anywhere in the galaxy.’ Most likely, in the heart of ork space, he thought.
‘Those of us that survive the journey,’ said Renius, pointedly. ‘Our battle-brothers on the ramparts risk being hurled out of the warp bubble and torn apart on the currents of the immaterium. That is, if the warp jump is successful.’
‘If it isn’t?’
‘If the warp jump fails and if Khargask refuses to abort the attempt…’
Renius took a breath as he brought his favoured weapon to bear on his attackers: a power axe, with a ridged blade shaped like half of the Cult Mechanicus’s symbol. It crackled and blazed as it bit hungrily into an ork’s stomach. ‘In that case,’ he resumed, ‘the reactor will almost certainly explode, with enough force to consume the Indestructible and dislodge this moon’s flaming remains from orbit.’
The orks, at least, were running out of reinforcements to throw at them. The flow of fresh bodies from below had finally abated, and the battle now had an end in sight. Sicarius continued with his tactic of hammering at one spot on the enemy line until suddenly – as another opponent fell with a gash in its throat, choking on its own blood – most unexpectedly, he found himself stumbling through it.
There was nothing now to keep him from his goal, from diving through the hole in the floor and confronting his true enemy at last. Nothing but the knowledge, which Sicarius accepted grudgingly, that another was needed down in the engine control room more urgently than he was.
Techmarine Renius was fighting three orks at once, one with each of his real and mechanical hands. Sicarius spun on his heel and slashed one of them across the back. Renius’s axe felled the second a moment later, while Lumic obligingly stepped in to engage the third. Sicarius yelled, ‘Renius, with me. Lumic and Filion, keep us covered.’ Seven orks were still fighting and Lumic had been badly bloodied; they were leaving their brothers outnumbered, facing almost certain defeat, but what else could they do? Ultracius would arrive soon, hopefully.
Sicarius and Renius burst through the Grand Chamber’s open doors.
A greenskin howled as it saw what they were doing. It hurled a wrench at Sicarius, who deflected it with a backhand swipe. He couldn’t see anything through the rectangular hole in the floor – there was too much smoke down there; the hole, he suddenly apprehended, had been dug for ventilation – nor could his auspex give him any definite readings. Whatever was waiting for him down there, however, his duty was to face it. He didn’t break his step.
Sicarius pushed off from the edge of the hole and plunged into the unknown. He dropped four metres and crashed down in the centre of a smaller chamber.
Through the smoke haze, he could make out flickering flames, the dark, angular shapes of rune panels around the walls – and the silhouettes of several sturdy inhuman figures in frantic motion.
Renius touched down heavily beside him and took a moment to get his bearings. ‘You deal with the engines,’ said Sicarius, ‘I’ll deal with the greenskins.’
A shadow, much larger than the others, came hurtling towards him.
He had a fraction of a second to try to work out what it was. It looked like a machine: an ork machine, haphazardly bolted together, heavier on one side than on the other, with all manner of random protuberances. It looked like a smaller and shabbier version of a Dreadnought – though not much smaller.
It was only when the shadow let out a curdling war cry that Sicarius saw a slobbering mouth and a glaring, blood-crazed eye in among the mechanics and realised that it was a flesh-and-blood creature. That was when he recognised his ill-famed enemy, at last, and knew it for what – and exactly who – it was.
Khargask!
CHAPTER XIII
Commissar Dast stepped out of the Centaur transport vehicle.
He had planned to join the men of Krieg on the front lines of their desperate battle. He was too late. He had felt the ground – the whole moon, it had seemed – trembling as the Indestructible had slowly wrenched itself free from its moorings.
He had had his driver bring the Centaur to a stop. Dast stood on the barren surface of the Agides moon; for once he was glad of the facemask that concealed his expression of horror.
He knew what had happened, having picked up the details from the vox-chatter that filled his ear. He ought to have been prepared to face it, and yet to see the massive star fort just hanging in the sky, where it had no possible right, and no reason to be hanging… he wondered how anyone could have been prepared for that.
He lifted a pair of magnoculars to his eyes. Even through their lenses, the Korpsmen clinging to the star fort’s walls looked smaller than ever. From this distance, even the Space Marines beside them appeared almost insignificant. Korpsmen and Space Marines alike, however, clung stubbornly to their uncertain handholds. Why didn’t they jump when they had the chance? Dast thought.
Why didn’t their captain order them to jump?
The commissar had excused himself from the command centre in the dugout, because he had done as much as he could there. Sometimes – more often than not, he had always prided himself – his captain actually heeded his advice; just not today. Today, the Krieg man preferred to listen to Sergeant Lucien.
It wasn’t just that the captain was in awe of the Ultramarine. Dast knew that, at heart, he genuinely agreed with his point of view. He agreed that a Space Marine was worth a hundred ordinary men of Krieg. Perhaps he was right. Anyway, the captain had made the decisions he had made. He had given his orders, and that was all that mattered. Dast could better serve his regiment elsewhere now.
The Indestructible had stopped climbing. It was shaking and groaning as if the effort of merely staying aloft might tear it apart. A transparent bubble of energy had formed around it, but it flickered and sparked as if it might burst at any moment.
As Dast watched, another Korpsman fell off the side of the star fort, followed in short order by yet another. They tumbled through the energy bubble, and from here he couldn’t tell if their bodies had been burned or fried by it. Either way, their next stop was the ground, too far below them.
Some of their comrades were hardier, or had been luckier. They had made it onto the star fort itself, onto the lowest of its stepped surfaces – the tops of its virtual ramparts – where of course they had a mob of eager, baying orks to contend with. Dast could only catch glimpses of the fighting from where he was, and hear breathless snatches of reports from those trapped in the thick of it.
The orks, to begin with, had had the advantages of height and cover over their attackers, not to mention their bestial strength. The arrival of Sicarius’s Ultramarines, however, had tipped the balance. A tide of bright blue-armoured warriors were tearing into the green-skinned xenos, eviscerating them with their whirring blades. Dast wished he could have been with them.
In addition, he was hearing – over the Ultramarines vox-channel, to which he had been granted access – that Sicarius’s command squad had penetrated the star fort’s heart. They were about to take on Khargask himself. He relayed the news to his regiment, to boost their morale. He told them that victory was almost within their grasp. Whether that was true or not, it didn’t matter.
He heard the Krieg captain’s voice: ‘Remember the value of the Adeptus Astartes to the Imperium – they are the Emperor’s angels.’ He knew he was speaking Sergeant Lucien’s words. He gathered that Lucien himself had attained the ramparts too and was leading his men from the front, fighting valiantly.
At the same time, he had had the Krieg Korpsmen form up in front of the Dreadnought, Ultracius. He was their most powerful weapon, according to Lucien, and Dast had certainly heard nothing to gainsay this. He couldn’t keep track of every single vox-report – hence the tactical hololith and its attendant servitors in the dugout – but more tha
n once he had heard tell of the Dreadnought’s twin-linked heavy bolter, tearing through ork flesh whenever it barked.
Lucien addressed the men of Krieg again: ‘The orks are desperate to take our best weapon out of action. So, let them slice and shred their way through you to get to him – because even as you die, you are frustrating them in their efforts.’ Dast chose not to dwell on the picture that those words painted.
The star fort gave another violent lurch, and he saw another score of figures – Korpsmen and orks alike, even a couple in blue – flung over the edge. The Space Marines had their armour to protect them, of course, and would survive the landing, perhaps even the passage through the energy bubble; the others had no such hope.
Dast lowered the magnoculars.
Only now did he realise that he had been walking across no-man’s-land, though he had no way of reaching his hovering objective. Even if he could, he knew he would be far too late. The Indestructible had shaken itself into a veritable frenzy. One way or another, it couldn’t endure the stresses being placed upon it much longer. One way or another, this battle – another war – would soon be over.
Had Dast fought alongside his regiment today, he would likely have died alongside them too, and for nothing.
The plain around him was almost eerily silent. The smoke that had smothered it had dispersed on a thin breeze. The Ultramarines artillery guns were biding their time, having done all they could for the present. There was no point in shelling the Indestructible any further, in dealing it any more damage than they already had.
Beyond the blue tanks, five siege towers stood in a forlorn row. The star fort’s sudden take-off had left them stranded, and though many Krieg Korpsmen had jumped from the tops of the towers to the star fort while they could, others had been left behind. They milled around the bases of the towers, helplessly.
Joining them were the men who had lost their grips on the walls, while the drop to the ground had been survivable. Dast counted roughly sixty figures in all, some of them badly injured. They were the lucky few.
There was little these few survivors could usefully do, little but try to stay alive despite the hunks of debris, pieces of unanchored equipment and bodies that were raining down from the teetering structure above them. Dast lowered his head and hurried to join them. He took charge of them, ordering them to heft their wounded onto improvised stretchers and begin to withdraw from the danger zone.
Above, the carnage showed no signs of abating. The voices of three quartermasters competed in the commissar’s ear with their roll calls of the recently deceased. The reports were coming in too fast for the servitors to collate. His guess was that, at most, four hundred Korpsmen remained in the fray, and that number was dwindling by the second.
‘Ultracius is withdrawing from the battle.’
‘–just ordered the Korpsmen that were protecting him to part and–’
‘He caught the orks, the ones in his path, unprepared. He just charged through their line and scattered them around him. He–’
Dast picked out Sergeant Lucien’s voice from the others: ‘Our Dreadnought has been summoned to assist Captain Sicarius inside the star fort. Men of Krieg, you follow in the shadow of the Emperor’s angels. Let them guide you to glory, let them guide you to salvation, let them be your shield against the alien and the unclean. Obey their orders without question for you serve the greater glory of mankind.’
‘Ultracius just shot out a stained-armaplas window,’ a quartermaster reported, ‘and crashed through its remains into the star fort’s inner compound.’
‘–left the greenskins reeling, disorganised in his wake. They can’t decide whether to follow him or–’
‘–paying dearly for their hesitation. The Ultramarines guns are cutting through them like–’
Dast heard the scrape of a boot against the earth, where there should have been no such sound. Instantly, his attention snapped back to his immediate vicinity. He spun around, in time to catch a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. He whipped out his bolt pistol and bellowed a challenge: ‘Who goes there?’
There came no answer.
His finger flicked to his ear, silencing his comm-bead. Now, Dast could hear frightened breathing; it was coming from behind the burned-out corpse of a Predator Destructor. He took a step towards it and issued his challenge again, in a sterner tone this time. A wretched-looking figure emerged from behind the ruined tank. He was wearing a Death Korps uniform, facemask and rebreather unit; immediately, however, Dast knew that this was no man of Krieg.
‘Identify yourself, trooper,’ he demanded. When the figure’s response caught in his throat, Dast prompted him, ‘You were issued with a number. What is it?’
The trooper had to check his own dog tags before he could answer.
Dast nodded. The number was a recently issued one. He didn’t need to tap it into his data-slate to confirm his suspicion: that this was one of the Agides miners who had been found here and pressed into service. He couldn’t remember his name, but that was unimportant. He kept his pistol levelled at the trooper’s head: he might just have been stupid and desperate enough to think about using his own weapon.
‘Why are you hiding, trooper?’ barked Dast, knowing the answer.
‘I…’ the trooper stammered.
‘Who ordered you to leave the front lines?’ He knew the answer to that too.
The trooper lurched towards him; for an instant, Dast thought he was going to attack. Instead, he fell to his knees in front of the commissar and his lasgun slipped from between his fingers, disregarded. ‘I… I’m a worker, not a soldier,’ he pleaded. ‘I was never trained to fight. I was never prepared for… for this.’
‘You jumped from the star fort,’ Dast guessed, presenting the question as a statement of fact. ‘You didn’t fall. You chose to jump.’
The trooper’s guilty silence was the only answer he needed. The commissar’s duty was clear.
This man had disobeyed orders. He didn’t need to be told the consequences of that. Dast told him to remove his helmet, which he did, with trembling hands. Dast put his gun to the trooper’s temple. He gave him a moment to make his final peace with the Emperor, then he squeezed the trigger.
He beckoned one of the other survivors to him. He had him strip the flak armour, the lasgun, the rucksack and the rebreather mask from the cowardly trooper’s body. He averted his eyes from the dead man’s face as it was revealed. He never looked at their faces, not the ones who had faltered in their duty. Their lives hadn’t mattered and were not worthy of remembrance.
The man’s equipment would be passed on to the Death Korps of Krieg’s next recruit. Dast hoped that, with the Emperor’s grace, this time it might be issued to someone more worthy of it.
CHAPTER XIV
Khargask cannoned into Captain Sicarius, with enough force to bowl him over had he not seen it coming in time to brace himself.
He had stooped to take the impact of the charge on his shoulder, which gave him leverage to thrust his attacker away from him. He swung his Tempest Blade at the massive ork, but a rusty servo-arm blocked it, showering both combatants with furious sparks. Another mechanical limb, with a snapping claw attachment, slithered over Khargask’s shoulder and struck for Sicarius’s throat. He was forced to surrender a step to wrench himself free from it, before it could tighten its hold on him.
In the meantime, Renius had downed a greenskin mechanic with his power axe, and a bank of rune panels was his now. His voice came over a vox-channel, calm and clear: ‘There’s a blockage in the hyper-plasmatic energy conduction system and a synchronous vibration in the tertiary warp engine manifold.’
Sicarius had found the orks’ guttural language easier to understand. There was no mistaking the Techmarine’s next words, however: ‘It won’t make it.’
In his flesh-and-blood arms, Khargask clutched an oversized sho
oter. Something flashed inside it and it bucked violently in his grip as it fired with a series of deafening pops. Its bullets sprayed the engine control room almost indiscriminately, but three of them tore through Sicarius’s armour. The damage to the unique Mantle of Suzerain would pain the artificers on Macragge.
One of the bullets lodged itself in the muscle of his left leg.
The pain only lasted for an instant before a cocktail of chemicals suppressed it. However, he could feel the bullet shifting, tearing through more tissue, as he twisted to avoid another metal-armed swipe from his opponent. It’s like fighting a giant octopus, he thought ruefully, I’m being attacked from every direction at once.
To Renius, he voxed: ‘I don’t want to hear that. I want those engines shut off. That’s why I included you in this mission, so do your duty!’
Khargask had only one eye, his left, red and rheumy. The other had been replaced by something that looked like a sniper scope, jammed into the socket; it wasn’t helping with Khargask’s aim. Sicarius suspected that it might serve as a primitive auspex. It looked painful; he hoped it was.
He ducked between the big mek’s whirling arms and hacked energetically at the armour that protected its chest. He felt he had dislodged something, but he failed to draw ork blood. He did raise Khargask’s ire: he was seething and spitting, hurling insults at the Ultramarines captain.
More than anything else, Khargask seemed affronted. He was more than aware, Sicarius guessed, of his own notoriety. Indeed, he had pulled off quite a coup, stealing the Indestructible from under the noses of the massed Imperial Navy. ‘Khargask!’ The ork kept bellowing out his own name as if it ought to mean something.
One of Khargask’s claw arms fastened onto Sicarius’s blade. The machine-spirits in both fought a savage duel of their own, rending and biting at each other’s metal flesh, oily black blood spraying from their arteries.
The Tempest Blade, ancient and mighty, emerged as the victor. Sicarius let it rest while he emptied his plasma pistol’s charge into Khargask’s face. Most of the sun-hot rounds melted intervening servo-arms, but one of them scorched the big mek’s eyepiece.